The seller tested one disc. It was the disc.
This SCPH-9001 came from Québec City in a two-console bundle sold for parts, because neither console would read the seller's disc. Mine, it read all of them. What was left was dust, a rattle, and somebody else's handiwork inside.
Before
After
I like honest sellers, and this one was. The listing had a big grey PlayStation and a PSone together, sold for parts, with this description: both consoles power on but couldn't read the one disc he had on hand, and given how they looked, he figured the drives were shot. I made an offer, it went through, and a few days later a box from Québec City was on the bench.
Read that description again, though. One disc. Two consoles. No word on which one did what. A single scratched disc failing in two machines is a perfectly ordinary Tuesday. So was I buying two broken drives, or one bad disc? Day one was about replacing his test with mine.
The test
Same routine as always: power cord, AV cable, controller, and the discs. Audio CD from the CD player screen: perfect, no hesitation. Legend of Dragoon: perfect, straight into the intro movie. Final Fantasy IX: perfect. Not a single retry, not a single skip.
So on my bench, this console has nothing wrong with its drive. Most likely it never did, and the seller's disc was the problem. I can't prove that, I don't have his disc, but I've got three of mine saying the drive is fine.
The rattle
One thing did bother me. Shake the console and something small rattled inside, a little tick of plastic sliding around. Not a screw, lighter than that. The shell was also dirty enough that I was going to open it anyway, so the rattle just gave me a mystery to solve while I was in there.
Opening it up
All six screws present, none of them stuck or stripped. That's rarer than it should be on a console this age. Lid off: dusty, but ordinary dusty, the kind a house makes over twenty years.
The mainboard was dusty too, but healthy. No corrosion, no burnt smell, and no modchip, which isn't a given on a PlayStation this old.
Somebody was here before me
Under the mainboard sits a metal shielding plate, and this one has clearly been worked on. Somebody cut and bent it along the top edge, maybe to make a plate from a different PS1 model fit, maybe for a reason I'll never know. It's not pretty, you can see the hacked edges, but it does its job and I left it alone. A good reminder that a 25-year-old console has had a life before it gets to you.
And the rattle? A tiny chip of grey plastic, smaller than a fingernail, that had broken off a rib inside the shell. Nothing structural, nothing that touched anything. Into the bin it went.
Cleaning
The plastics went into hot water with Dawn dish soap. The stubborn marks on the shell, scuffs the soap didn't touch, came off with a magic eraser, gently, because it's an abrasive and it will dull the texture if you lean on it. Everything else got isopropyl alcohol.
I still cleaned the lens too, one gentle pass of isopropyl on a cotton swab. On a console this age it's never a bad thing to do, even if the 9001's laser is known as one of the most reliable in the whole PS1 family: the launch models had a plastic sled sitting next to the power supply that warped with the heat, and this later design fixed that. This one didn't need it, but a clean lens is cheap insurance. Then dry, reassemble, and test again.
Verdict
Nothing was wrong with this console. It read every disc I own before I did anything to it, and it read them all again after. The "repair" cost C$0 and an afternoon.
The lesson isn't that the seller was wrong to list it for parts. He told me exactly what he did, and that's why I bought it. The lesson is that one disc is not a test. If you're checking a PlayStation, use a disc you know is good, and more than one if you can. And if you're buying one sold as "doesn't read discs" by someone who only tried one, the odds might be better than the price says.
